The BBC World Service has been broadcasting in mutiple languages for over 70 years. As the international broadcasting arm of the British Broadcasting Corporation - the BBC - it produces programming in 43 languages, for 160 million listeners every day. You can catch the World Service on shortwave, FM or digital radio, or on the internet in even the most far-flung corners of the globe. Recently, our ever growing web presence has required us to provide the technologies enabling us to re-use the radio content on the web. And almost all of that material has to be written down.

This paper describes how we moved from hand-written news reports with pencil and paper in 1987 to our modern Unicode-based IT systems, which allow our journalists to work and communicate internally and internationally in 40 of those languages.

The session will take a look at some of the software that we developed; those early decisions and their consequences, which still affect us today; how we raised the importance of language issues with internal and external applications developers and upper management; how we migrated nearly 2000 language users through three different solutions between 1989 and 2002. Finally we take a look at what we still need to do.